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by NightsMistress



Category: Young Wizards - Diane Duane
Genre: shameless abuse of timelines
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-21
Updated: 2015-06-21
Packaged: 2018-04-02 16:19:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,579
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4066516
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NightsMistress/pseuds/NightsMistress
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When faced with a problem even she can't solve, Dairine refuses to go to her sister or her Seniors for help. As such, there is only one thing for it.</p><p>She will have to ask the only person who already knew she was going to ask for help: herself.</p>
            </blockquote>





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**Author's Note:**

  * For [inelegantly (Lir)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lir/gifts).



> Hi there, Inelegantly! This story is designed to stand alone based on your knowledge of the first five books, but when you finish reading the series, I recommend coming back to this story.
> 
> I hope you like it!

When Dairine Callahan, fresh off her Ordeal and completely aware of how much of a hot-shot she was, discovered an artificial intelligence on her own planet, her only thought was _why had it taken so long?_

Dairine had been fascinated by the internet even before she had taken the Oath and been partnered to a more-magical-than-normal MacBook. What had drawn Dairine towards the internet was that online she could be anyone. Offline, she looked like any other eleven-year-old —perhaps a little more delicately built having inherited her ballerina mother’s build — dressed in jeans and a rotating wardrobe of Star Wars t-shirts. While her wary suspicion might have been a little sharper than that of the average eleven-year-old, there was little to suggest on first appearances that Dairine was anything special. There was certainly little to suggest that behind those watery grey eyes was someone who could turn the universe into a pretzel if she truly wanted to.

When her classroom had finally allowed her access to the internet, Dairine had studied it with the hyper-focused attention that she took to anything that was new to her. After all, it couldn’t hurt her if she knew how to make it work. She had learned very quickly that it was not the egalitarian world she had hoped for, which pained her. People had taken the purity of the online world and smeared their own prejudices on it. She would still be insulted or jeered at if she revealed that she was in her teens (which she almost was so it wasn’t _really_ a lie) and female. So to get the respect she craved, she hid her gender. It was surprisingly easy to pass as a boy in his late teens, so long as she was careful which forums she visited.

Being a boy on the internet had more advantages than simply avoiding unsolicited photographs of penises, Dairine found. She was able to explore her latest interest: artificial intelligences in MMOs. She had read stories about artificial intelligences born on MMO servers, being brought into existence with the passion and love the players had for the game. When something was repeated again and again in literature, it usually meant that there was some unconscious understanding that this was a truth in the universe trying to come out. Any good wizard quickly became attuned to these kinds of coincidences, as they knew that they were no coincidence at all.

She had been reading the rumor board on various forums for signs of non-playable characters doing things that were unexpected. There were more than she anticipated, though most of them were glitches that could be — and often were — exploited by the player base. She was not interested in those, though as a student programmer herself she had some empathy towards programmers whose mistakes were held up to ridicule. Instead what interested her were NPCs that had no narrative purpose but still had dialogue if they were addressed by players. She wasn’t the only one. In fact there were boards dedicated to discussing the dialogue and speculating what lore the designers were feeding through that particular NPC.

As such, when Dairine eventually found an NPC whose dialogue was more sophisticated than any NPC had any right to be, it didn’t come as a surprise to her. It was everything else that did.

* * *

 

The game itself was nothing special. In fact, it had barely a few hundred players at all, written by one passionate programmer who seemed to implement patches to the program whenever he or she learned about them in college. The game didn’t even have an original name, calling itself The World. It was buggy and prone to random shutdowns, and the boss fights were either impossibly hard or impossibly easy to beat. What it did have though was a fiendishly clever interface that rewarded innovative tactics, and no restrictions on player versus player combat. It was a game that rewarded the most ingenious, cool-headed and possibly very sleep-deprived gamers, and those to whom the game appealed to took to it with gusto.

Dairine did not take to the game at all.

Dairine’s avatar got killed seven times in the starting area before she grew tired of that. One of the advantages of being a wizard was that she was literally able to communicate with anything, including computer programs. No one had told her that she shouldn’t tweak the code of the MMO installed on her parents’ computer, so naturally that was the same as giving her express permission. _Besides,_ she thought as she persuaded the programming code that made up the game that it really could allow her to do as she wanted, _really, this is wizardry._

A few minutes later and her avatar, a slender red-haired elf-analogue, was coded as being an NPC with all the immortality that entailed. She then sweet-talked the program further so that her character only appeared visible to other NPCs. No need to draw too much attention to herself. _It’s a good thing the code’s so bad,_ she thought. _Modding World of Warcraft is a bit beyond me at the moment. Maybe next week._

She walked past the guy who had killed her avatar three times in a matter of minutes and then camped her corpse. To her amusement, he didn’t even notice she was there, and she was tempted to steal his stuff. She decided against it; it wouldn’t really be very fair.

The invisibility and invincibility cheat had the unfortunate side effect of making the game even more glitchy than it already was, and there were times when the game froze entirely. Fortunately, one of the glitches was to turn the music off, which was no real hardship. Dairine had heard some of the sound clips on YouTube and so was content to put on her own playlist of battle themes from various, better games.

Once she entered the castle — or at least what she thought was the castle — where the suspiciously intelligent NPC was living and working as a blacksmith, the game froze and her screen went black. For a moment Dairine had a horrible feeling her little hacking escapade was about to be discovered before she had even achieved anything. Then everything righted itself again, and she let go a breath she hadn’t even been aware she was holding.

She slipped through the throng of NPCs milling around the castle hawking their wares in stereotypical English slang, and directed her character down the stairs to the basement of the castle where the forge was. She saved her game before opening the door at the bottom of the stairs, and grinned to herself. It was just good gaming sense to save before a major boss, right?

She directed her character to push open the door, selected the human blacksmith working the piece of metal, and said “Dai stihó!”

Her game crashed immediately after that.

When she reloaded her save, her character had been stripped naked. Dairine scowled. She was _invincible_. There was no way anyone could have killed her avatar, let alone stripped it of all of its weapons. It did, however, answer the question of whether the blacksmith NPC was more than it seemed.

Dairine huffed a sigh and tried again. This time her game froze after she selected the blacksmith. When she loaded her save, she was outside the castle, stripped naked once again, with just one thing in her inventory: a note. She read it and rolled her eyes at the use of language in it. At least one sentence had profanity used as a noun, verb and adjective! The most annoying part about it was that the note was identified as a key item and therefore Dairine had to keep it in her inventory.

She had another go.

And another.

* * *

 

The AI tossed Dairine out four times after her first attempt, each time with an increasingly nasty message that she hoped that her father could never see. While she was certain that he knew that she knew all of those words, avoiding the topic altogether would be far preferable. He might even take the internet away from her entirely, believing that she needed to be shielded from that kind of behavior, and that would be far worse.

She bit the side of her fingernail thoughtfully. She needed another approach to get through to the AI. It obviously wasn’t listening to her — or at least not _yet_. It made sense when she thought about it; it had grown up in a world where violence and rudeness were normal. It only made sense that its view of the world was somewhat askew to Dairine’s. In retrospect, she was lucky it hadn’t decided to smoke her computer. That would be far more difficult to explain to her father.

She hated to admit it, but she might need to ask for help.

 _Not Nita,_ she resolved. While she had needed her ultimately for her Ordeal, she didn’t want to rely on her sister all the time. She hadn’t before she got wizardry, and she wasn’t about to start now. She supposed she could ask Tom or Carl, but that option didn’t appeal to her either.

The answer, when it came to her, was inspired. She would ask _herself_.

“There are two options,” Spot said when she filled him in about her plan, and displayed both on his screen. A timeslide would mean that Dairine would briefly visit the future or her older self would briefly visit the past. Dairine considered this but decided that it was inconvenient. She had arranged herself in front of the computer such that she was far too comfortable to get up and disrupt her arrangements of heater and blanket. Also, she supposed she would need permission and that was always harder to obtain than forgiveness. On that note, bringing her older self to her was right out; Dairine knew herself well enough to know that that would not get her what she wanted. She could hold a grudge for a very long time if she wanted, even if it was against herself.

Time alignment, a spell that would open a window through which she and her other self could see each other without leaving their own timeline, intrigued her. She’d skimmed through the explanation, ignoring the warnings as applying to people with less power to burn than herself, and while it seemed complicated, Dairine was confident enough that she could pull it off. She cracked her knuckles. She was pretty sure it would work.

After Spot displayed the spell for her, Dairine had downgraded her assessment to ‘fairly confident’. It wasn’t that the spell was complex, but it was subtle and Dairine was not a subtle person. Still, she was committed now. _A spell always works,_ Dairine thought, before closing her eyes and telling Spot to let the spell run.

When she opened them she did not just see the comfortably old and battered sofa in their living room. Superimposed over the sight of the sofa was the window for the time alignment, four feet square and as crisp as any LED screen. Dairine stared at the familiar sight of her room for a moment, a slow broad grin stretching across her face. _It worked!_ she exulted. She studied the sight hungrily, looking for clues for her own future. The desk was as it always was, piled high with debris from old and abandoned projects. She could see Spot, a sleekly black shape in the corner, far thinner than he was now, and she spared a thought of _I wonder when Spot does that!_

Finally, her older self appeared in the panel. She didn’t look much older than Dairine, at least not at first. She still had the red hair that Dairine cursed every morning as she shoved it into an untidy ponytail, the floppy nerdy t-shirts and the delicate build. There was some chest development, which Dairine observed with some dismay given how much she had teased Nita about her own development, but unless you looked at her eyes, the older Dairine looked very much like Dairine did now. Her eyes, though, they looked old and sad, and there was a gem resting at the base of her throat unlike anything she would normally wear.

She opened her mouth to ask what happens to her in the future, but her older self put up a hand.

“Uh-uh,” older Dairine said. “No spoilers. It was hard enough being here to take your call. I thought you were never going to get around to it.”

“Obviously I was going to,” Dairine said. “Otherwise I wouldn’t have known to wait for me to call.” Her curiosity got the better of her as she asked “Why would it be hard to be here? Are people still bugging me to move planets?”

“I literally just said no spoilers,” older Dairine said with an exaggerated sigh. “But no, that drops off in about a year.”

“A _year_?” Dairine was terribly dismayed by this. The novelty of being able to move a planet had worn off very quickly when she realized how utterly dull it was to move a planet. The thought of a year of putting up with ridiculous requests to move planets that were perfectly fine where they were was not a good one. “I thought it’d only last a few months.”

“We get better at telling them to go away after a few months,” older Dairine said. “So what’s up?”

“Don’t you already know?”

Older Dairine rolled her eyes. “Probably, but it’s been a few years for me and I’ve been busy.”

“It’s about this AI I found on the internet,” Dairine began, and filled her older self in. After she finished, older Dairine nodded.

“Oh yeah, I remember this,” she said. “The answer’s pretty easy if you think about it.”

Dairine gave her older self a cock-eyed look. “If it was that easy, wouldn’t I have already thought of it?”

“I did,” older Dairine said, and her grin widened as Dairine scowled at her. “Come on, you’ll get to do this yourself soon.”

That did little to console Dairine because she was not her future self yet. She turned to Spot. “Any ideas, little guy?”

There was the almost-silent whirring that Spot did when he was thinking. It was unnecessary, as Spot’s hard drive was lightyears beyond what modern technology could do, but it was an affectation Dairine found endearing nonetheless. What was interesting was that the Spot on the older Dairine’s desk was also whirring, lights flashing in syncronisation with Dairine’s Spot. “Yes,” Spot said finally. “Why not the Mobiles?”

Dairine blinked. She remembered Logo’s promise that one day her children would come to her world and wake up her planet’s quicklife, naturally, but she hadn’t expected to introduce them to their first cousin so soon, especially one so poorly socialized that it was practically feral. Still, if anyone could show an errant AI how to be a good computer citizen, it would be those guys.

The older Dairine was frowning, not in anger but in puzzlement. “That’s interesting,” she mused. “That didn’t happen in my loop.”

“Yeah?” It took Dairine a moment to understand the implications of what had happened. She had assumed that they were part of a closed time loop, where everything that would happen had to happen because that was how it had gone in the past. _I really should have read the notes,_ she thought ruefully. “What solution did you come up with?”

“The Mobiles,” the older Dairine said, shrugging. “But I came up with it on my own.”

Dairine grinned. “But I did,” she said cheerfully. “You were the one going on about how you are me and I am you.”

Older Dairine conceded the point with a nod. “I should have known that was coming.”

Dairine put up her hand, finger pointing to the ceiling. “But now we can talk about using this timeline. Spoil me.”

The other Dairine tilted her head in thought. _So that’s what it looks like from the outside,_ Dairine mused. _I look a lot like Nita when I do that._ “I’ll do you a deal,” she said finally. “I will tell you the spoilers that I wished at the time someone had told me.”

“And in exchange?”

“I need you to make me a spell.” The older Dairine should have looked embarrassed to be asking help for this from her younger self. Dairine was sure she would be embarrassed. Instead, while she looked angry, it was the fierce, righteous anger of someone who had discovered some injustice in the world and was about to make it pay.

“Okay,” Dairine said. “No problem. Right now?”

“It’s going to take you longer than _that_ ,” the older Dairine said tartly. “Even when we had all that power behind us, we couldn’t have done this. It’s going to take years to get it right.”

“Oh, I get it,” Dairine said. She did. Give her the job now, and then when their timeloop closed, it would be as if her older self had always had the spell. She would be annoyed that she didn’t think of it sooner, except that she had. Besides, if she was going to be shown up by anyone, she would prefer it to be her future self. Instead of being shown up, it was more of a promise of her being on top in the future. “All right, send it across.”

The other Dairine typed on her Spot for a few moments, before looking up. “While we wait for that, you won’t like the second Star Trek movie, because some classics don’t need to be remade.”

“They didn’t remake the whale one, did they?” Dairine had not seen that movie for a while, but she had a vague recollection that it was by far the best of the movies.

“No, Wrath of Khan. That’s the first spoiler. The second is that Benedict Cumberbatch is in it.”

“Who?”

“Treasure that.”

“All right, what else?”

“DC are going to reboot their universe,” the older Dairine said. “But _Blue Beetle_ is a good title, so definitely start reading that.”

“Okay,” Dairine said. She scowled, because she knew what her older self was doing and she didn’t like it. It was condescending, having your older self still refuse to tell you what you wanted to know: your own future. “So why won’t you say anything about what’s going to happen in the future?”

Older Dairine shook her head. “There’s spoilers and there’s _spoilers_. Besides, we already changed your future. Anything I say could be wrong.” Her grin was very sardonic as she added, “Besides, you need some surprises in your life.”

“Gee, thanks,” Dairine said. “Glad you’re looking out for me.” She looked over at Spot, who had received her older self’s message and was looking thoughtful as it read it. Reading the spell herself, Dairine could see that it was a searching spell that would turn an object into a dowsing or divining rod for a thing or person. The spell itself looked incomplete — the amount of power needed to run it was enough to make her eyes water, and she doubted that she got more magical power the older she got. It probably could be refined, and made more efficient, but it really wasn’t something that she could do immediately.

Her older self was right, Dairine realized. This was a job that would really take a couple of years to finalize. Perhaps she should find this daunting, but Dairine just thought of it as a delightful challenge. She’d been bored of late having her solutions handed to her by virtue of her being able to brute force her way through. This looked complex enough to be worthy of her time.

She looked up to her older self, looking peculiarly anxious at her. “You’ll do it?”

“Yeah,” Dairine said. It was her turn for a sardonic grin. “Besides, who else can you ask for help, if not yourself?”

“Exactly.”

“Okay, I’m going to cut the connection,” Dairine said. “Neets’ll be home soon and she’ll have kittens about me using the time stream to plus-one our spells.”

“Maybe,” older Dairine said. “Or she could just be mad that she didn’t think of it first.”

Dairine laughed in spite of herself. Now that she thought about it, perhaps it was more likely that Nita would be mad she hadn’t thought of it first. Since getting wizardry, Nita had become a lot more self-assured and the temper she only sometimes let off its leash in the past now was something that appeared quite a bit more often. It was hard to imagine that this time a year ago Nita just ran from her bullies.

“All right, I’m disconnecting.” She flashed the Vulcan salute at her older self. “Live long and prosper!” Her older self returned the gesture, and then Dairine cut the spell.

She took a breath to try and settle her giddy excitement. It didn’t help. She had reached into the future and spoken to her future self, and if that wasn’t worth a little dance in her purloined chair, she honestly didn’t know what was. She even had a plan to deal with her little AI problem, without having to ask for help. After all, it hardly counted as asking for help if you were asking yourself.

Dairine cracked her knuckles and settled into her chair. She had an AI to beat.


End file.
